全球化背景下高校"两课"教育的思考和创新

全球化极大地促进了世界范围内不同思想文化的相互激荡,西方的意识形态、社会思潮和价值观正在冲击、动摇我国主流意识形态和主流文化的地位,对高校“两课“教育带来了新的严峻的挑战.面对这种挑战,高校“两课“教育要与时俱进,实现教育理念、教育内容和教育方法的创新,不断提高“两课“教育的针对性和实效性.     

从终身体育的角度出发略论高校体育教育改革

文章运用文献资料等方法,讨论了目前我国高校体育教育的现状．高校体育不仅仅是中小学体育的简单延伸,而且还担负着中小学体育与终身体育之间的桥梁作用,因此文章试图从终身体育的角度来略论在新世纪中我国高校体育教学的改革．     

The port and maritime industries in the post-2008 world: Challenges and opportunities

This article introduces the theme of this issue - the port and maritime industries in the post-2008 world - including its background and significance. A brief introduction on the contents of this issue is also given.     

Cash flow sensitivities during normal and crisis times: Evidence from shipping

Using a system of equations model, we analyze how cash flow shocks influence the investment and financing decisions of shipping firms in different economic environments. Even financially healthy shipping firms felt strong negative effects on their financing activities during the recent crisis. These firms were nevertheless able to increase long-term debt. Banks internalized the impact of foreclosure decisions on vessel prices and avoided an industry-wide collateral channel effect. Even during benign economic conditions, financially weak shipping firms underinvest because of their inability to raise sufficient external capital. The substitution between long- and short-term debt during the pre-2008 crisis periods shows that the composition of financing sources is more indicative of whether firms face financial constraints than the pure size of the financing-cash flow sensitivities. An analysis of firms’ excess cash holdings confirms the importance of financial flexibility.     

海上丝绸之路与印尼民丹岛华人民间信仰的传播

印尼廖内群岛的民丹岛古称长腰岛,是古代海上丝绸之路的重要枢纽,18世纪来自中国的潮州与闽南的大量移民聚居民丹岛,种植甘蜜、胡椒并从事进出口行业,对民丹岛的开发做出了重要贡献。华人移民也促进了中国民间信仰在民丹岛的广泛传播。     

Short-term planning of liquefied natural gas deliveries

The ability of a supplier of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to deliver cargoes at desired times, while effectively managing a fleet of cryogenic vessels can significantly impact its profits. We investigate in this paper an LNG short-term delivery planning problem by considering mandatory cargoes as well as optional cargoes to select, along with the scheduling of a heterogeneous vessel fleet with controllable cruising speeds. Several technical constraints are accommodated including time windows, berth availability, bunkering restrictions, inventory, liquefaction terminal storage capacity, maximum waiting time, and planned maintenance restrictions. The objective is to maximize the net profit.We propose a mixed-integer programming formulation that includes a polynomial number of variables and constraints and accommodates all of the problem features. Also, we describe an optimization-based variable neighborhood search procedure that embeds the proposed compact formulation. To assess the quality of the generated solutions, we propose a second valid formulation with an exponential number of decision variables and we solve its linear programming relaxation using column generation. We provide the results of extensive computational results that were carried out on a set of large-scale set of realistic instances, with up to 62 vessels and 160 cargoes, provided by a major LNG producer. These results provide evidence that the proposed improvement procedure yields high-quality solutions.     

Relevance of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) for bulk shipping

Some scholars consider that today’s market conditions are in favor of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) rather than the Suez Canal Route (SCR). However, the number of bulk carriers using the NSR remains extremely limited, despite higher fuel prices since 2009 and subsequent significant fuel savings. In 2013, there were 53 transits via the Arctic, out of which 27 by oil tankers and 6 by bulk carriers. In this article we show that this result might be attributable to a factor, which is not considered in most studies: the spot freight rate to fuel ratio which governs ship owners’ decisions regarding the sailing speed. Due to a low ratio since 2011, the speed of vessels on the SCR is at its lowest level, and potential NSR fuel savings are too limited to provide a viable alternative. We further argue that, contrary to most studies, internalizing NSR environmental benefits marginally improves the attractiveness of the NSR.     

Segment-based alteration for container liner shipping network design

Container liner shipping companies only partially alter their shipping networks to cope with the changing demand, rather than entirely redesign and change the network. In view of the practice, this paper proposes an optimal container liner shipping network alteration problem based on an interesting idea of segment, which is a sequence of legs from a head port to a tail port that are visited by the same type of ship more than once in the existing shipping network. In segment-based network alteration, the segments are intact and each port is visited by the same type of ship and from the same previous ports. As a result, the designed network needs minimum modification before implementation. A mixed-integer linear programming model with a polynomial number of variables is developed for the proposed segmented-based liner shipping network alternation problem. The developed model is applied to an Asia–Europe–Oceania liner shipping network with a total of 46 ports and 11 ship routes. Results demonstrate that the problem could be solved efficiently and the optimized network reduces the total cost of the initial network considerably.     

Batteries in offshore support vessels – Pollution,climate impact and economics

This paper assesses the pros and the cons of installing batteries on offshore support vessels. These vessels are specially designed to provide services to oil and gas operations, such as anchor handling, supply and subsea operations. They have multiple engines and advanced dynamic positioning systems to ensure that they can perform their duties with high reliability at nearly any sea state. Combined with high safety requirements, this has resulted in general operational patterns with vessels running multiple combustion engines even at calm water conditions. For emissions, low engine loads yield high emissions of exhaust gases such as nitrogen oxides (NOx) and aerosols such as black carbon (BC), due to less favorable combustion conditions. The high span for these vessels between low loads and high, and their great need for potential power at short notice, motivate our examination of hybrid setups with electric: the vessel segment should be more favorable than many. We find that combining batteries with combustion engines reduces local pollution and climate impact, while the economics with current battery cost and fuel prices is good enough for new vessels, but not good enough for retrofits.     

A tailored branch-and-price approach for a joint tramp ship routing and bunkering problem

This paper deals with a practical tramp ship routing problem while taking into account different bunker prices at different ports, which is called the joint tramp ship routing and bunkering (JSRB) problem. Given a set of cargoes to be transported and a set of ports with different bunker prices, the proposed problem determines how to route ships to carry the cargoes and the amount of bunker to purchase at each port, in order to maximize the total profit. After building an integer linear programming model for the JSRB problem, we propose a tailored branch-and-price (B&P) solution approach. The B&P approach incorporates an efficient method for obtaining the optimal bunkering policy and a novel dominance rule for detecting inefficient routing options. The B&P approach is tested with randomly generated large-scale instances derived from real-world planning problems. All of the instances can be solved efficiently. Moreover, the proposed approach for the JSRB problem outperforms the conventional sequential planning approach and can incorporate the prediction of future cargo demand to avoid making myopic decisions.